Slashdot Mirror


Ogg Support For iTunes

bdesham writes "Mac OS X Hints has a story about a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."

23 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. About damn time! by Shuh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?

    1. Re:About damn time! by bahamat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.

      But 100% of what I rip myself is ogg. And that's what I want to take with me. Not some crap riped with poor hardware at low bitrate by Joe Blow in MP3 format.

    2. Re:About damn time! by tuffy · · Score: 5, Insightful
      AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance.

      Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this press release.

      I'll stick with an open format, personally.

      --

      Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  2. Sounds more like a bugtraq issue by jukal · · Score: 5, Funny
    Ok, I know this is cheap but...the wording in the article makes the useful plugin sound more like a security problem :))

    a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive

  3. Does this mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does this mean it'll play BOTH of my OGG tunes perfectly?

    AWESOME!

  4. Uh... by autopr0n · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.

    Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  5. This is great by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... but Ogg isn't going to make any major headway until the embedded decoder vendors (Crystal, Micronas, ST) start supporting it. Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation, and two, the DSP vendors need to be convinced that it's worth the precious ROM space to fit another codec in there.

    Ogg just came to the party WAY too late. It is up against a massive chicken-and-egg problem if it wants to supplant MP3. Nobody's using Ogg because it's not supported, and nobody's supporting it because nobody wants it. The advantages of Ogg (slightly better quality, free) are massively outweighed by the ubiquity of MP3. Like 'em of not, Fraunhofer did a fantastic job with the original codec, and it's going to take something with a massive improvement in quality/compression/cost to supplant it. Ogg is better, but not "better enough".

    1. Re:This is great by mosch · · Score: 5, Insightful
      That's an excellent point, but there's another more important one. 95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap. They're not going to pay an extra $50 or $100 for an ogg-enabled iPod, and the general public doesn't give a fuck (flying or otherwise) about ogg, so they won't pay anything extra for ogg support.

      So why would anybody support it? Until the costs of implementing ogg are damned near close to $0, nobody's going to spend the time and money implementing the code, integrating it all, testing it and supporting it.

    2. Re:This is great by rseuhs · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better. In listening tests from heise.de, 64kbps oggs were closer to the original (or better) than 128kbps mp3s. (And it was the best codec of all, better than WMA, AAC and MP3pro.)

      So if the hardware manufacturers support ogg, they can say that their device holds 2*x songs instead of x. If you buy such a device would you go for the one that holds 1000 songs or the other that holds 2000 songs if they cost the same?

      Also, the hardware vendors sure don't want to pay for mp3 forever so it's in their interest that another format replaces it. (Even if it takes a long time - like a decade or even longer.)

      So I'd say ogg is "better enough".

    3. Re:This is great by Graymalkin · · Score: 5, Informative

      For the hardware vendors though it is a question of space. Can an Ogg codec fit into the same ROM space as an MP3 codec and only use the same resources as said MP3 codec? If not they will not use Ogg codecs. Nor will they use Ogg codecs if it halves the battery life of the device, if the Ogg needs so much processing muscle it uses twice the wattage as the MP3 encoder they can't really sell that to people. Who cares if the device holds twice as many songs if the battery life is only half of what it would be otherwise. If playing an Ogg made my iPod only last 5 hours there's no way in hell I'd ever use them better quality or not. I routinely run my iPod for 8-10 hour stretches any period of time less than that is unacceptable for me personally.

      Work on Ogg is going to continue and some intepid soul or souls are going to make a super cool Ogg decoder that can run on a paper clip taped to a Dorito but until then MP3 and WMP are going to dominate because they fit on the existing hardware.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  6. to repeat a post from macslash by Knife_Edge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Someone on macslash (first post I believe) question why anyone would care about ogg. I think that question bears repeating. What is so great about ogg that would make people want to use it instead of mp3?

    1. Re:to repeat a post from macslash by puck01 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This is a legitamite question. I'm a big fan of .ogg, but most people I know just don't care. MP3 is good enough, and all the hardware they've purchased supports it, not .ogg. This has been said many of times, because its true, and that is if .ogg is going to go somewhere it needs to be supported on hardware just as much or more that mp3. Most people have not been given an obvious reason to switch and unless mp3 starts costing consumers $$, most will never care.

      Hell, its damn near impossible to find .ogg files on the p2p apps out there anyway. I tend to share hundreds of them, just to try and spread them around, but hardly anyone ever downloads them compared to any mp3s I'll share.

      In any case, the more progress .ogg makes the better, even if it is small steps like this. Hopefully, we'll start seeing some huge steps in the near future with hardware.

      puck

  7. Re:I think ogg should have been named ... by MyHair · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think it should've been named "og3" (oh-gee-three) to associated itself a bit more with em-pee-three.

    The non geek probably ignores "Xiph Ogg Vorbis" but might pay attention to "og3" and understand what the hell it might be.

    Plus ogg is a generic container format and will be used for other Xiph codecs, including video. So calling a Vorbis music file Ogg is shortsighted.

  8. any good P2P progs to find ogg... by dfj225 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wondering if there are any P2P programs that have a lot of users w/ ogg files...I use kazaa but I'm not finding a lot of ogg files.

    --
    SIGFAULT
  9. Or you could use by jerrytcow · · Score: 5, Interesting
    a nice small program that plays both out of the box. I've been using whamb today and it plays .mp3 and .ogg files just fine.

    As a bonus it "only" uses 7-10% CPU on my iBook as opppsed to iTunes' 20-30%.

  10. No... by Eric_Cartman_South_P · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...just the first one.

  11. Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Rhetoric... by loply · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."

    I wish people around these parts wouldnt act as if everything does is delibartely designed to harm you. That evil, evil Apple, doesnt want you to play your ogg files! All of us are lumped with tons of ogg files on your hard drives but apple wont support us! Oh no!
    Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.

  12. Re:mp3 - ogg (You wouldn't want to do this...) by Malic · · Score: 5, Informative

    MP3 is a "lossy" format - so is Ogg. Conversion from MP3 to Ogg would result in double loss in comparison to the original source CD.

    --
    I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
  13. Re:mp3 - ogg by lostchicken · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is no point to doing this, unless you want to drop the bit rate, or just want ogg for political reasons.

    When you encoded into MP3 (or any lossy format, for that matter) the quality went away for good. Re-encoding it will just re-encode the low quality stream, introducing the new Vorbis (OGG Audio) artifacts on top of the MP3 ones. If you re-encode your library, the audio quality will get worse, period, although the drop will me minimal, and you might squeeze a little more compression out of it.

    To answer your question, though, dbPowerAmp should do the trick.

    --
    -twb
  14. Re:Common sense, people by Tokerat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why can't you play your Ogg files with Audion?

    Or Unsanity Mint Audio?

    Or Macamp?

    They all support Ogg. And I'm sure I forgot at least a dozen more. Claiming the Mac can't play Ogg because iTunes doesn't support it is about as ridiculous as saying Linux can't do your budget because there is no spreadsheet built into the kernel.

    The article poster is trolling on that last sentence, plain and simple.

    --
    CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
  15. Re:Don't read slashdot much, do you? by messiertom · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.

    Oh, imagine the new Apple commercials:

    I was ripping my songs in MP3, and in the middle of the song, it was like, "beep beep beep beep," and my song was ruined, and I had to rip it again, and it wasn't as good, because it was at a lower bitrate.
  16. Bzzt, wrong by xiphmont · · Score: 5, Informative

    Vorbis decode currently requires more memory to decode than mp3/WMA (about 120kB using Tremor; we plan to reduce that to about 30-40kB).

    It does not require more CPU.

    Monty

    "You sounded pretty authoritative for being dead wrong."

  17. ...but your assumptions are incorrect. by xiphmont · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.

    We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.

    Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.

    When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.

    At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us :-)

    Monty